


I Could Not Stop For Death

by sergeant_angel



Series: Fixed Points [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, by doing crime sometimes ok it happens, dealing with immortality, father-daughter bonding, harknesses are like 'heterosexuality? idk her', i will never spring a major character death on you guys i wouldn't do that to you, major character death but like not permanent, martha and mickey: we are not old enough to have a full grown adult daughter what even, my version of the child-of-companion trope, what if i just made you all read about my oc how about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:07:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23274466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sergeant_angel/pseuds/sergeant_angel
Summary: In the distant future, Jack Harkness has a daughter.As one might expect, she's not exactly normal.
Relationships: Jack Harkness & Original Female Character(s)
Series: Fixed Points [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686151
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	I Could Not Stop For Death

**Author's Note:**

> That title is so pretentious compared to what this fic actually is

Dad tells her everything. Well, almost everything, and if she asks him direct he’ll answer, and that’s the foundation of their relationship: he doesn’t lie. Not to her.

There are some things that it hurts him to talk about, and as she gets older she just decides not to ask, she goes looking for those answers on her own just so that she doesn’t have to see how much it hurts her dad.

She grows up on stories about Donna and Rose and Martha—with Martha there, herself, to roll her eyes and refute what he says. Martha’s her mum in all the ways that count, even though Dad says she hasn’t got a mum at all, just a fact of biology.

So DonnaRose learns about her namesakes, one gone and missing from the world, the other good as lost to it. Her dad tells her about a brother she’ll never meet, that he had to kill, and oh, she’d been steamed about that. About a family she should have had. She learns about the immortality and Cardiff and rifts and London during the Blitz, Gwen and Ianto, Tosh and Owen, Sarah Jane and Kate Stewart, Harriet Jones, but there’s always one name her Dad dances around.

The Doctor.

DR knows the Doctor is important. He’s got a whole damn team in Torchwood, just keeping an eye out for him, and he’s the reason for a lot of things in her life, she knows, but Dad doesn't talk about him. Martha and Mickey are no help either, though both of them share stories, it’s clear that they’ve got opposing viewpoints about him.

DonnaRose will, years later, vividly remember being fourteen. Mickey is trying to teach her about engines, and he tells her: the Doctor is brilliant, and he’s dangerous. If you decide to go lookin’ for him, DR, that’s your choice, but you go in with both eyes open. He changes people. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, and he’s dangerous, and he’s ancient, and he isn’t always nice, or good.

Just like dad, then, she’d said, and Mickey had gone perfectly still.

No, he’s nothing like your dad. Your dad understands things the Doctor never could.

Like what? If the Doctor can travel all of time and space and is so smart, what doesn't he understand?

Everyday life. Drudgery. Trudging through the boring days and the bad ones, the ones where nothing exciting happens. The Doctor doesn’t know that. One day, the Doctor might be half the man your dad is, and he’d be proud of that.

…

DonnaRose is still going by the nickname JJ when she meets the woman with red hair. Her Dad has popped back to Martha and Mickey’s time so they can babysit her; the Torchwood Archive is its own small planet and isn’t always safe. DonnaRose is just old enough that she’s started asking the Big Questions but not old enough to understand all the answers, and it feels a little like Dad might have gotten overwhelmed and that’s how she wound up here.

She’d just asked about the Doctor. He always comes up in stories but nobody ever _tells_ her anything about him, just that he flies around in a blue box and he’s mad.

What does that mean, anyway? A blue box?

But Dad had promised. He’d promised to take her to Woman Wept because she’s never seen snow before and now he’s _gone_ , and she _hates_ him, she doesn’t want to be called Jack Jr anymore because she’s not like him, Dad had said so when he caught her dangling off of one of the walkways.

 _You’re not like me!_ He’d shouted, shaking her a little. _JJ, you’re not like me! You can’t do that!_

DonnaRose digs her crayon into the paper and the tip of it breaks off.

Stupid blue crayon. Stupid blue box. How do you fly in a blue box, anyway? She thinks of her Special Things Box, no bigger than a pillow, and wonders how a person’s supposed to travel in that.

“Hello there,” says the woman with red hair.

DonnaRose glares at her, because she wants to glare. She then looks around. Martha is next to the sandbox, talking to a man with a brown hair. DonnaRose thinks she might know him. He’s wearing scrubs, so maybe Martha works with him.

“What are you drawing?” Red Hair asks again, and DonnaRose huffs.

“A blue box,” she says.

The woman’s eyes focus in on DonnaRose, now, in the same way Mickey’s do when he can tell she’s lying about not eating the last cookie.

“Why?” the woman asks. “Why not a brown box, or a pink one?” She prods DonnaRose’s hoodie. “Seems like you like pink, yeah? So why blue?”

DonnaRose stares at the woman, thinking. She looks back to Martha, who smiles and waves.

“It’s my question book,” DonnaRose sighs, closing it so she can show the woman the cover. _QUESTIONS to ASK_ , the cover proclaims in Mickey’s neat block letters. Mickey always helps her with the covers because Dad and Martha both have bad handwriting. There are a few stickers on it, of eyes and wolves and UFOs even though most UFOs don’t look like that, and one or two superheros. It’s new enough that none of the stickers are peeling off yet. “I write down my questions. And the answers. When Dad lets me go in the archives, I write down what I find in the back.”

She frowns when she thinks about Dad. _You’re not like me!_

“What sort of questions? Like, why does the earth go ‘round the sun? Why’re flamingos pink?”

“Not those kind.”

“Can I look?” The woman holds out her hand, wiggling her fingers. “Maybe I've got some answers, yeah? I know some things.”

DonnaRose thinks about it. She flips back a few pages and pulls the pen from the spiral that keeps the pages together, writes another question. Silently, she hands the notebook to the woman.

DonnaRose glares at her feet as the woman reads her questions. She copies questions over from her other notebooks, the ones that don’t have answers yet, and some of the ones that do have answers that are really important, or the ones where the answer changed.

The Woman finally looks up. “Well, I can help you with that last one. My name’s Amy. Amy Pond.” Amy Pond reaches out her hand, and DonnaRose shakes it. “It's nice to meet you.”

Sixteen through eighteen is terrible. Later, she'll realize it's terrible for everyone, but for her it's particularly weird.

Because Dad sends her to Earth.

She's sixteen and _pissed_ , she'd just been about to level up in Venusian akkido and the only person on Earth who might know it is Dad, just a younger version, who she is not supposed to interact with, not that she'd be _able_ to because she's not allowed to _go_ anywhere, she's stuck in _the north_. Not even London! In Mickey and Martha's super great house, she's IN.THE MIDDLE. OF NOWHERE. IN HIGH SCHOOL.

And yeah, okay, she loves Martha and Mickey, loves spending time with them because they're Different kind of adults than Dad. Like having a mom, really. Even if they _do_ get suspiciously tight-lipped on why they've been assigned a two-year mission in the north.

But even with that. The Archive is her _home_ , and she misses it. And the fact that Dad won't even tell her _why_ he's sending her away, how the Torchwood Archives have become dangerous for a teenager when they weren't dangerous for a baby--he's never Not Told her something. 

She hates it. High school, on _Earth_ , she's too smart for this. Smarter than most of her teachers, some of whom she likes. She's not really popular, not that it matters, but she misses Mel and Danny and Dad didn't even _ask_ her--

She makes some friends though, and there's a boy who understands being shuffled off by a Dad who can't be bothered.

DR is thirty and change when she finds out that, unlike Dad’s fears—or hopes, she’s never sure—she _is_ like him.

She’s been captured with a girl she loves, fighting on some backwater planet to shut down part of a slaving route. They are in front of a firing squad and the last thing DR knows is pain exploding in her stomach, her chest, her arms, and her head--

DR wakes up confused. The suns are just coming up over the horizon and there’s an unbearable stench around her.

She’s in a ditch, and when she looks around she retches, though there’s nothing in her stomach.

She’s surrounded by bodies.

Her clothes are bloodstained and torn and she claws her way out, dragging herself as far away from the pit as she can, collapsing in a pile of dead leaves, leaving her staring up at the branches.

Away from the ditch, she can start to think. The bodies weren’t fresh, that’s for sure. Not that she knows a lot about dead bodies, but she’s watched enough crime shows with Mickey to know _that_. The rate of decay means she was there for a few days at least. Was she unconscious? She remembers pain, lots of it, and getting shot…

There are bullet holes in her clothes, and blood dried brown and stiff around them, but her skin underneath is unblemished.

She finds her way to a village. She scares whoever is there, using their communicator to call Dad and ask for a ride.

“What happened?” He asks. He looks like he’s been crying. Did he know? He had to have known. Did he tell Mickey and Martha? Would he have called the Doctor to try and save her, if the Doctor would even take his calls?

DR looks down at her ruined clothes, at her shaking hands, then back at her dad.

“I died.”

The thing is.

The _thing_ is.

The thing is, DonnaRose is, basically, a clone of her Dad.

She’s one hundred, she hasn’t been in love in seventy years, she’s not married, got no children, and no sense of direction or purpose, and eternity stretches out unbearably far in front of her. She’s not _quite_ like Dad—it takes her longer to come back and she doesn’t heal much faster than a normal person—easier, sometimes, to die and come back whole than to wait out the healing process. She’s not sure it will last. Maybe one day she won’t come back. Her genetics are just different enough that Dad worries about it. She spends a decade studying her own genes, comparing them to Dad’s, until she can find all those little differences, seven of them in all.

She loses interest then. What’s the point? What does it matter how she’s different from Dad when she’s just like him in the only way that matters?

She’s 132 and doesn’t look a day past thirty. The Torchwood Archive, where she has lived her entire life, feels like a prison rather than a home and she hates it, feels trapped here but trapped in her own skin most of all.

She’s 137 when Dad gives her a vortex manipulator. “Go out and find something to live for,” he tells her. “Just remember to come back and visit your old Dad once in a while.”

She doesn’t use it right away, feels guilty about it. She should be able to do this—Dad does it, after all, day-to-day.

She goes to school, learns about medicine and physics and mechanics and history until her head is so full she wants to scream.

Just a quick hop, she thinks. Just to clear her head.

The sky where she lands is bright, nary a cloud in sight, two suns high overhead and a faint breeze rustling leaves on trees. The air is crisp, refreshing, and it carries screams from a village at the foot of the hill. There’s a ship outside the edges of the village, Braxian, if she’s not mistaken, and the distinct sound of laser guns being fired. She adjusts her coat, checks her pockets, and starts racing down the hill.

She is 150, and DR’s life has finally begun.

**Author's Note:**

> we're all quarantined so I'm just going to make you read about my OC, sorry not sorry.  
> also, it's me, so no beta. stay tuned for more of DR's adventures, including: Jail time!


End file.
